Colter's Path (9781101604830) (8 page)

Delicious smells enticed Jedd as servers appeared and began doling out food. Jedd was disappointed to see that there was no third setting in place at the table. Obviously neither Emma nor anyone else would be joining them for this dinner.

McSwain read his thoughts, apparently. “She is not here, Jedd. Perhaps it would have been more thoughtful of me to let you know from the outset that I, and only I, issued this invitation to you. But frankly I was afraid you would be less likely to come if you knew Emma would not be with us.”

“It would have been a delight to see her, sir, no denying it. But she is a married woman now and I respect the sacredness of that institution. It would have been inappropriate for me to have set my sights too firmly on seeing her. She belongs to someone else.”

Instantly McSwain's expression became openly sorrowful. “Yes,” he said. “Someone else. Not you who would have been the love of her life, nor me, her father. Another, far less worthy, has her.”

A pall descended over the conversation for the next several minutes. An excellent dinner was served, but Jedd found little enjoyment in it…. He was conscious of his unsophisticated, common clothing as compared to McSwain's fine business suit, and of his own rustic table
manners, which he tried to correct by clumsily imitating McSwain's elegant dining style. It was not easy to do for a man who had been raised in a rough-and-ready household where many meals were eaten from wooden trenchers or the most basic of crockery.

The meal ended quickly, both men eager to move past it. Jedd still did not know why he had been called to this place.

Over brandy and cigars a few minutes later in a well-furnished parlor, McSwain drew in and exhaled a long, deep breath, then looked Jedd squarely in the face.

“It should have been you.”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Don't call me ‘sir,' Jedd. Call me by name. I was very nearly your father-in-law, after all. That is what I'm referring to when I say it should have been you. Emma should have married you instead of the lout she chose.”

“I…I don't know what to say to that, Mr. McSwain…Zeb. I've got to say, though, that I'm inclined to agree. It was a bad time for me when she cut me loose. I've forgiven her, but still I wish, like you just said, that it had been me she chose.”

“Yes indeed.” McSwain paused. “And I daresay she almost certainly holds the same view now.”

That, Jedd thought, was an intriguing comment. He asked a very direct question. “Is she not happy in her marital situation?”

“Stanley Wickham is a difficult man. Harsh. Perhaps cruel. I am certain he has been unfaithful to her. He has struck her sometimes, I suspect…. There were bruises on her arms the last time I saw her. She tried to hide them, but then, when Stanley was not aware, she made sure I saw them. She didn't say how she had received them, but it wasn't necessary for her to do so. Her look, the way she indicated him with a flick of her eyes in the direction he had gone…I knew who had injured her.”

The thought of Emma suffering at the hands of a man so unworthy of her enraged Jedd to the point that he rose from his chair and paced about the room, struggling for something to say and not finding it.

“He is a hard man, Jedd. Not one any father would want to see his daughter marry. I wish that in some way I could have made her see the truth about him before she chose him. But I couldn't see it clearly enough myself.” McSwain glowered. “It should have been you she chose. It should have been
you
!”

Jedd remained unresponsive, thinking to himself that this was surely one of the strangest, most strained conversations he'd ever been faced with.

“She chose Stanley Wickham over me because he has money, Zeb. Me, I'm a poor man. Poor all my life.”

McSwain studied Jedd with a frown. “Poor in the financier's sense of the word, yes. You are rich, however, in capability. In potential. And in character. And
that
is the kind of wealth that Emma's husband—God, how I hate even to acknowledge that ‘husband' is what he is—it is that kind of wealth that he lacks. Had Emma married you, she would have had something so much better than she got…. And eventually, I believe—perhaps very soon—you will possess wealth of the monetary variety as well.”

“Zebulon, I don't understand why you brought me here tonight to tell me this. Is this leading to something? Is there something you want from me?”

McSwain drank again before he answered. “There is, Jedd. I have heard you are about to lead an emigrant band to California. Is this true?”

“I am to pilot such a group…. Leadership, in the full sense of the word, would be in the hands of others.”

“General Lloyd, you mean.”

“And the Sadler brothers.”

McSwain smiled quickly and wanly. “I know the Sadlers well. They are…
interesting
. Interesting men.”

“I don't yet know them well, but I suspect that ‘interesting' is as accurate a description as you could speak.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“So, why does our emigrant band interest you?”

McSwain's expression became excessively earnest. “I want to be part of it.”

Jedd gaped a couple of moments, then very nearly
stammered as he said, “You…
you
are thinking of prospecting for gold?”

“Is the notion so absurd?”

“It's just that…well, don't you have a lot of things that hold you here in Knoxville? The presidency of Bledsoe College, for example?”

Suddenly McSwain was unable to hold Jedd's gaze. “Jedd…Jedd, things…change.”

He told Jedd the story. Though he had served for several years as seventh head of the college founded in 1786 by clergyman and educator Eben Bledsoe, a dramatic change had occurred. Bledsoe College as an independent entity was soon to be no more. It was being absorbed by another Knoxville college formed about a decade later than Bledsoe's academy, East Tennessee University, formerly known as East Tennessee College and before that as Blount College.

“And since Bledsoe is being made part of the other school, there is no place for a president of Bledsoe College,” Jedd surmised aloud.

“Exactly. My position ceases to exist.”

“But surely there would be a place for you somewhere in the combined institution.”

McSwain leaned back in his seat, steepled his fingers, and studied the ceiling. “There is no more political an institution in existence than an institution of learning, Jedd. I wish I could say that I have made it as far as I have in the academic life without making enemies. But it would not be true. There are those out there who would gladly see harm done to me, even see me destroyed. I am in a most precarious situation at present.”

Jedd had expected to hear nothing like this. Was McSwain telling him that there were those who would harm or kill another person over something so trivial as the affairs of an academic institution? Surely not.

McSwain looked at him more intently. “I called you here tonight, Jedd, first to let you know of my high regard for you, my belief in your character and your future, and my wish that Emma had made a better choice regarding
you in her affairs of the heart. Second, to tell you I wish to become part of your emigrant band to California. I must get away from this town and this situation I am in. And my best prospect lies in going to the place where new lives and situations are to be forged. The place of new beginnings. The land of promise.”

Jedd said, “California is no land of promise. Just of
opportunity
. There's a difference. I think most who run to California expecting instant wealth will find that wealth will come only after a long period of very hard work. Or maybe not at all. For example, there are stories around town saying I made some kind of major gold strike in California already, then defended my gold against a bunch of thieves. You'd think I've been picking my teeth with gold toothpicks and skipping gold nuggets across the river, the way some have talked around here.”

“Whatever the case, I must go. If not to California, then some other place where I can lose myself and not be found.”

Jedd pondered the man who at one time might have become his father-in-law. “Let me ask you straight out: Are you in actual danger, Zeb?”

McSwain's face seemed to sag and age before Jedd's eyes. Before he could answer the question, though, a noise outside, a muffled thumping, caught both his attention and Jedd's. McSwain hurriedly moved, hiding behind a door and peering out around it like a scared child shielding himself from imagined phantoms in his bedroom.

The sound had come from the area of a rear window. Jedd rose and headed toward it, asking, “Are you expecting other callers than me tonight, Zeb?”

“None at all.” McSwain pointed toward the door through which their dinner had been carried, then hooked his finger leftward. Jedd, understanding, nodded and slipped out the door, then turned left, and moments later exited the house and found himself behind it.

He saw the source of the noise they had heard: a man
was trying hard to slip away from the back of the house and make for a storage shed in the back lot. Jedd moved fast and had the fellow held by coat collar and arm in half a moment.

“Ben Scarlett,” Jedd said. “What the devil are you doing out here?”

J
edd!” Ben Scarlett exclaimed as he realized who held him. Jedd felt the drunk relax a little in relief. “You nigh scared me to death!”

“Well, you making noise out here scared Mr. McSwain just as bad!”

“I was just looking for something, Jedd. Didn't mean no harm.”

“Looking for something? Something to steal, you mean?”

Ben was the image of offended righteousness. “I ain't a thief, Jedd. I'm a drunk, but I ain't a thief.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

“Jedd, at houses where there's money, there's food, too. Some of it gets thrown out the back door for the dogs and cats and varmints.” Ben paused, studying the look on Jedd's face. “Sometimes the varmints that need it most are the two-legged kind. You might look down on me for it, but there's been times aplenty when I've been glad to fight with a dog for a throwed-out pork chop with a couple of bites of meat left on it. It goes with the life I live.”

“I don't pass judgment,” said Jedd. “In my own life I've taken meat from the remnants of a critter that fell
victim to wolves and coyotes and such, and washed it down with muddy puddle water. Out in the wilderness, I've flapped my arms to run the buzzards off from something a lot of folks would turn away from, but which to me was going to be that night's stew meat. I'd throw it in a cookpot with roots and wild turnips and such I'd foraged out for myself in the woods. So like I said, I don't pass judgment.”

“Well, I like that. A man like me gets where he expects to be judged most all the time.”

“If you're going to be nosing about behind people's houses, Ben, I wouldn't worry about getting judged. I'd worry about getting shot.”

Ben was unable to find a good retort, which seemed to annoy him. “Is that right? Well, maybe you'd best be worrying about what might happen to you if you come busting out and surprise folks like that while they're minding their own business and just looking for a scrap or two.”

“Lord, Ben, are you threatening me?”

“No. Just saying that you're lucky that it was me you found out here, and not the gent who was poking around here and then run off when I showed up. He didn't look none too friendly, and he had a gun in his hand.”

“There was somebody out here with a gun when you showed up?”

“That's what I said.”

Jedd looked around into the darkness, thinking about the conversation that Ben's noisemaking had interrupted, wondering just what it was Zeb McSwain had done to get himself into such a state of danger.

A trace of juices from the fine piece of mutton that had been set before Ben Scarlett only five minutes earlier remained on his plate, so with a glance at his watching tablemates that let them know he was about to violate propriety, he swabbed a finger through the juice and thrust it into his mouth. He had violated propriety already by wolfing down the mutton like a starved pack dog, holding it in his hands like fried chicken.

“You were a hungry man, Mr. Scarlett,” said Zeb McSwain, who had invited the vagrant in for some of the best food of his life once he learned that Scarlett had been foraging for old kitchen scraps outside his house.

“Mighty nice of you to feed me, sir,” said Ben. “'Specially since I wasn't supposed to be out there.”

“Ben, I'll never let any man go hungry at my back door. But forget about that. Who was this fellow you saw out there with a gun?”

“Never seen him before, sir. And he didn't linger for no introductions. Nor did he say a word. He cut out and busted clean through that hedge you got back there.”

“Did you get a good look at him?”

“Good enough. Tall fellow, hair the color of dark sand, big hands, strong. Notched ear.”

“What ear?”

“Notched. His right ear. Piece cut out of it, like he'd come out on the worst end of a knife fight sometime past.”

“I'm glad he didn't hurt you, Ben.”

“I doubt it was me he was here to hurt.”

McSwain frowned. “Indeed, my friend. Indeed.”

Jedd sat silent, taking this in and wondering who would have cause to threaten McSwain, and why.

“Mr. McSwain, is it true what they are saying?” Ben asked.

“What are they saying? And who are ‘they'?”

“Just folks round town, that's all. They're saying you won't be heading up Bledsoe College no more.”

“There's not going to be a Bledsoe College anymore, not as an entity to itself,” McSwain replied. “So they won't need a president for it.”

Ben lowered his head and looked like a man with something to say and reluctance to say it. “I heard it a little different than that, sir.”